Category Archives: Events and Announcements

” “I Don’t Believe You” kicks off the album with chiming bells and an upbeat church hymn slowed down and matched to a barrage of processed chanting voices. The song morphs into a hypnotic guitar loop layered with ringing synths, guitar washes and ghostly vocals, all building to a cacophonous climax replete with bleating saxes, a buzz metal riff and shredded guitar. “Tower of Babble” begins with sounds of rainfall and something sounding like slowed-down Gregorian chants as a chiming guitar melody softly repeats, eventually giving way to a buzzing organ drone, a tribal drum beat and belted German vocals before taking a final sinister turn with an insistent snare roll propelling the song towards its grand finale. The album concludes with the side-long, three-part “First Rites, Last Communion” suite. Heavily comprised of processed Asian church ceremony field recordings accompanied by occasional guitar and keyboard statements, the piece eventually erupts into a maelstrom of noise blasts, wild guitar and ringing bells before settling into a series of long, drawn out tones. ” – wf

“M. Geddes Gengras, hip cat and modular wizard from the City of Angels with a bunch of tapes out on various imprints like Stunned Records, Full Of Nothing and Sacred Phases is delivering two sidelong tracks like solar wind straight from the heart of the sun: bubbling and boiling hot psychedelica. Mindmelting! Can you stand the heat?” – sicsic

“Sneaky Snake is an experimental sound project in synthesized tonal waves. Its explicit purpose is the creation of altered states and well-being within the viewer/listener. George Jensen and Ian James began Sneaky Snake by focusing strictly on long form ambience as a means to induce trance-like, semi-consciousness within the audience. Lost within the environment and their subjectivity, participants often experience worlds within themselves. Over time Sneaky Snake has invested itself in complicating the paradigm, introducing aspects of field recordings, sampling, and synthesized drum beats into its healing music.” – ss

“When I first heard Sagan Genesis, I was struck by his melodic synth music — he actually played arpeggios instead of the arpeggiate button (musicianship, how quaint!). This tape rolls around a year+ later and maybe college life has beaten him down. The music’s darker and atmospheric. Even when melodies do creep in, they’re less sunny CA and more overcast Portland. Great moody stuff. Waxy Tomb is Julia Litmer-Cleper. Tape listeners will miss out on the spectacle of her live show, which incorporates some performance art, but in a recorded setting, her minimal, vaguely menacing neo-proto-industrial noise songs stand out all the more.” – wf

April 7 – 8p

$5

Synchronicity is thrilled to be working again with The Rattling Wall and the second issue’s featured artist, the wonderful Lyndsey Lesh! Lyndsey started an exciting collaboration with Michelle Meyering, founder and editor of The Rattling Wall, that will be documented on Off Thee Wall.

When we look at the world around us, the images we perceive are first presented to us in the form of rays of light. This light reflects from an object and enters our eyes, which then focuses the signal and delivers it to the brain to be interpreted as an image. Through this interpretation, an image is constructed, we partly imagine and create what we see. Is sight an abstraction of reality? What and how do we each perceive? In GLEAMING, each artist shares their own distinct abstractions of the familiar.

Kelie Bowman’s paintings on paper allow the figurative to dissolve into abstraction where layers of the external world meet the internal worlds of our mind and body. Inspired by her recent residence on a sailboat, these pieces reflect the endlessly new landscapes of pattern and repetition found in the restlessness of moving water.

STO’s papier mache sculptures focus on the deceivingly simple: tools that might be found in a shed and household items such as a broom and a bag of trash lay on the floor, as if waiting to be taken out. In zeroing in on objects that would normally be deemed as merely functional, his painterly takes on the mundane by breathing new life into what we usually ignore.

Jessie Vala’s sculptures and drawings explore the human form crumbling open to minerals and textures of the earth. Human figures morph with abstractions of the forest, sea and rocks, at once form is overtaken melting away to an elemental love affair.

Rob Doran uses the power of objects to reduce portraiture into still life, revealing the ghosts that haunt the vessel, the architecture, the linens. Seemingly a kind of neo folk art steeped in storytelling, memory and meditative communication, a shaker utopia where the landscape is a hat.

GLEAMING will be on view at Synchronicity Space from February 11 through March 10, 2012. An opening reception will be held Saturday, February 11 from 7 to 10pm, with a special music and video performance from Light Hits at 7pm.

Jackie O Motherfucker’s Tom Greenwood has a rich and diverse artistic output. Not confined to one band, or even media, Tom often collaborates with other artists to constantly push and explore himself.

Born in 1966, a child of the high Dakota plains, Tom Greenwood showed inter-media tendencies early on. While in high school he divided his time between visual arts (winning a scholarship from Kodak for his photographic work) and sonic arts (playing Purple Haze at biker rallies). He bounced around art schools of the frozen north before ending up on the streets of Minneapolis, where he took his degree in Media Arts.
After spending the end of the 80′s immersed in the aesthetic milieu of rural scum rock, creating the splendid Project A-Bomb record label in the process, Greenwood drifted into the open bowels of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Tom found work as an art director and participated in the Maynard Monroe-curated group show, URBAN ANALYSIS (with Nan Goldin, Rene Ricard, Lady Pink, etc).

Greenwood ended up in Portland, Oregon in the mid 90′s, where he head birthed the seriously disturbed musical project that continues to this day – Jackie O Motherfucker. An extraordinarily mutable feast, Jackie O’s music encompasses everything from industrial ho-hum to acid-volk ready-mades, and has included hundreds of participants over its lifespan. Under the influence of mysterious Northwest bohemians (often associated to some degree with The Holy Modal Rounders), Greenwood studied how to spin garbage into garlands. This technique proved invaluable when he drifted back to New York City, where he connected with Thurston Moore, who encouraged his conceptual moves.

In the 21st Century, Greenwood has created dual vistas of strangeness, all of them whistling like the rings around the o-mind. The musical projects – Jackie O, the U-SOUND series, various shows and galleries – have blended into the visual ones, and splattered in a million unexpected directions.

Synchronicity Space is pleased to present Animation Breakdown at Synchronicity: Artwork from Animators. The exhibition features painting, drawing, and sculpture from established and emerging artists who are also successful animators. Synchronicity Space is hosting this exhibition in conjunction with the Cinefamily who are featuring the artists’ animation work in a new monthly program at the theater, Animation Breakdown. The opening reception will be held Wednesday, November 30 from 7 to 10pm, and the exhibition will remain on view through December 23, 2011.

December 1 through 6 the Cinefamily, along with co-presenters Cartoon Brew and Animation Block Party, is inaugurating Animation Breakdown, their new, recurring home for original and groundbreaking animation, with a five-day festival celebrating the greatest in mind-expanding international animated works, old and new, shorts and features. The show at Synchronicity kicks off this festival by hosting an exhibition showing work from artists whose originality and breadth of vision encapsulate the scope of the new brand’s mission to bring exciting and widely divergent animated art to audiences. This exhibition is co-curated with Alex McDonald, head programmer of Animation Breakdown, to reflect an ideal range of the types of boldly unique artists that the program has dedicated itself to showcasing. This amazing group of artists are coming together to show their work that expands beyond the screen. Some pieces you will recognize as derived from their moving images and some will showcase the artists’ alternate side to their animation work.

+more!

Last Friday, Miko Revereza and M. Geddes Gengras screened their two-hour VHS video, REFRACTIONS, following it up with a live audio/visual performance and a dance party from the Where’s Yr Child DJs: MMG, Sun Araw and Egroeg. The following pictures were taken by Diva. Check out her amazing blog!

This Friday we’re excited to be hosting the VHS release of video artist, Miko Revereza, and musician, M. Geddes Gengras’ collaboration, REFRACTIONS. The VHS tape is limited to 50 copies and will be available the night of the event. REFRACTIONS will be followed by a live performance and Where’s Yr Child dance party!